I am currently working on some baby blankets. The first two off the loom are woven in waffle weave, so named because the weave creates little pockets that look just like waffles. They contribute to making the blanket very soft and cushy. My baby blankets are 100% cotton, so as an added bonus, when the baby out grows its use as a blanket, it can graduate to a bath towel. Just the thing to wrap a toddler in after a romp in the tub or pool.

I have recently purchased a new (to me) loom. It is a Louet Magic Dobby Loom. A Dobby Loom uses a pegging system to program the treadling combinations which, unlike a traditional loom which has a limited number of treadles, allows for any combination required to create a particular weaving pattern. My loom has 24 shafts which allows for some pretty complex designs.

Recent Projects

I belong to a study group through my weaving guild. The four of us have been together for over 10 years, exploring a variety of topics, including colour theory, effects of texture and a variety of weave structures. We are currently looking at doubleweave and the various things we can achieve through this. Doubleweave creates two layers of fabric that can be left separate, joined on one side to make a double width fabric, joined on both sides to make a tube or manipulated with a pick-up stick to exchange the two layers to create designs on a single layer of cloth. I hadn't done doubleweave before, so I began with a sampler to exploer the variety of techniques.

January 2019 - My first project on my new loom was a set of shopping bags. For a project with my study group, I was reading an older issue of Handwoven magazine, May/June 1998. One of the articles, by Lillian Whipple, was about taking an overshot pattern and converting it to Summer and Winter. The beauty of this adaptation is that different parts of the pattern can be woven in different colours, thus the green vines and coloured flowers. I decided to give it a try and made these bags.

May 2017 - A gamp is created to explore what happens when various weaving elements (colour, texture, weave structure) interact in a variety of combinations. This is a colour gamp I made to explore how colours vary. It was threaded with a range of colours from black through a rainbow to white, then woven with the same colours in the same order. The result is all the various colour combinations, with a diagonal line of pure colours going from the upper left corner to the lower right.

To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada, I created a small maple leaf hanging. I feel one of Canada's most exciting and notable features is the variety of races and cultures represented within the country's borders. I used doubleweave which creates two separate layers that the weaver can interchange to create images. The red and white border is a smooth cotton and the people are represented by a textured boucle cotton in a variety of skin colours.

Jan 2017 - I spun some multicoloured superwash fleece to make mittens for my grandsons, Max and Sam. Their hands are close in size, so to make the mitts easy to tell apart (and harder to lose at school) I embroidered their names on the thumbs.